Is mystery book REALLY Taylor Swift's memoir? The clues that have Swifties pre-ordering untitled work they believe is star's autobiography Made In Chelsea's Ollie Locke and husband Gareth reveal the gender of their unborn twins in sweet video So that's how she stays in such great shape! Emily Ratajkowski pushes son Sebastian's stroller up a NYC sidewalk while holding a heavy bag Mae Muller's Eurovision performance under threat as the singer is forced to go on vocal rest ahead of final It’s obviously a bit of a gamble choosing one’s Book of the Year in March - but there’s a very good chance already that mine will be Otherlands. This planet is still, as the book’s subtitle reminds us, ‘a world in the making’. Journeying into the abysses of deep time in Otherlands certainly makes the reader feel very small and transient - a feeling both humbling and comforting - and surely reminds us that we pay our minor daily troubles too much attention.īarring some unprecedented effort of global cooperation, which seems a little unlikely at present, the world will rapidly head back soon to something like the steamy, swampy Eocene epoch of 50 million years ago, bringing a mass extinction of today’s flora and fauna (including us, unfortunately), and then, after a few million more years, a huge explosion of unimaginable new species better suited to this hothouse earth.

None of these familiar stars had even been born yet. Then there were animals so strange that scientists have named them Hallucigenia, and there was no North Star in the sky, nor a single star of the seven in Orion, nor brilliant Sirius.

Going back to 550 million years ago, our world seems like another planet altogether. There are so many wonders here: a rock wall in modern Bolivia where dinosaur footprints climb gecko-like up a sheer vertical cliff, because the surface of the earth has tilted 90 degrees over 32 million years beavers and hedgehogs, Asian arrivals, wiping out native European primates the incredible fact that it was on huge rafts of vegetation riding the ocean currents that many animals, including monkeys and guinea pigs, travelled accidentally from Africa to South America, surviving an ocean voyage of at least six weeks on their uncertain craft. OTHERLANDS By Thomas Halliday (Allen Lane £20, 416 pp)

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